Snowboarder Max Parrot documented cancer battle with film

When Max Parrot stood at the top of the Big Air run in Oslo late last month, the cancer was gone, and he was sick only of the camera.

The Hodgkin’s lymphoma had come uninvited, of course, but the camera was Parrot’s idea, a means of filling his life with something other than chemotherapy and Netflix when normally he would have been snowboarding all over the world.

“Filming a movie was kind of a dream for me for a very long time but my goal was definitely not to do this kind of movie,” Parrot said Thursday from Montreal. “I always wanted to do a documentary, more about my athletic life and how I grew to be good.

“But this is a story that I think is going to inspire a lot of people and maybe help others who are going through cancer. Any energy or inspiration you can get when you’re battling cancer, every little thing makes a difference. If I can be a little thing for someone else, I’ll be very happy.”

Parrot, a 25-year-old Olympic medal winner from Bromont, Que., was diagnosed last December, after he found a lump on the right side of his neck. In January, he was told that six months of chemo would give him a great chance to beat the disease, which was caught early but he couldn’t compete on the World Cup circuit, at world championships or the X Games. This news was as devastating as the diagnosis.

“I’m the kind of guy who can’t do nothing for two days, you know. I need to do something. I couldn’t process in my head that I would be doing nothing for the whole season. This is when the idea came up; filming the whole process.”

To make the inevitable intrusion more bearable, Parrot sought enlisted a friend from Granby, Antoine Senay, to man the camera. He shot video of Parrot four or five days a week, for five hours a day. At his home. At the gym. And in the hospital while he took chemo, which made him sick.

“I literally had a camera following me 24/7 pretty much. They were trying to capture all the moments. When I was on my chair, for the first treatments, I was just talking with my girlfriend and my family who were there with me.

“After that, it became harder and harder to do the treatments. I had nausea problems. My mind kind of associated the cancer with the hospital and every time I was talking about it or just stepping foot in the hospital, I was pretty much vomiting.

“During the treatments, it’s about three or four hours, I had huge nausea problems, so we had to find a way to get the treatments done. That’s why they drugged me a little bit, so I could sleep and still have the treatments.”

The camera caught all of it, including the vomiting, which might stay on the cutting room floor.

“Being filmed in your worst moments, when you don’t want to see anyone, when you want to be alone, you have to have a camera on your face,” said Parrot. “The goal is to be authentic so I didn’t really have a choice. Since it’s my project it took more of my heart to do this. I was passionate about doing the project.

“The hardest part was at the end, doing these past couple weeks. When you film every day since January, you get a little bit tired, you don’t have privacy anymore. It feels good right now to be done with that, actually.”

The film doesn’t have a working title or release date, but editing has begun and Parrot is in the middle of a two-week staycation at home in Bromont, golfing, hanging with girlfriend Alysson Gendron and mountain biking with his dog.

Soon enough he’ll be training for a World Cup season again, maybe pare it back to only the major events, since his energy has been sapped and it takes longer for him to recover. He needs a break from training, but he missed it dearly.

“Sport is something that is really important for me. It’s the thing I was missing most during treatments. When life takes away your passion for months, you get really hungry, really motivated to do it again. So right now I can say I am much more motivated to snowboard than before.”

The movie project has been motivational too, and has given him a look into his future beyond competitive snowboarding.

“I want to continue doing contests for the next few years and my long-term goal is to go to the (2022) Olympics in Beijing. After that I would slowly stop doing contests and move towards filming more. I thought if I start now, I will have a pretty good base for when it is time to switch.”